Abstract
The marketization of higher education, which is becoming competitive due to the growing number of tertiary institutions, has attracted the attention of scholars. Previous studies have focused on promotional strategies in institutions' websites, prospectuses, and social media, while little attention has been paid to promotional emails. This study, therefore, complements existing studies by examining the rhetoric in promotional emails of tertiary institutions within the context of student enrollment. The data includes 80 emails sent by 20 higher education institutions to prospective students and were subjected to discourse analysis using Bhatia's genre analysis. The findings reveal three move structures: self-promotion, incentive, and invitation through rhetorical strategies of the institution's achievements, scholarship opportunities, and event participation using linguistic resources that indicate intentions to persuade potential applicants. The findings show how tertiary institutions attempt to build friendly relationships with prospective students through persuasion.
Top1. Introduction
The number of foreign students enrolled in higher education abroad has increased by 54.1% since 2000 (OECD, 2008; Oplatka, 2010) as a result of globalization which has led to the marketisation of Higher Education (HE). In the same vein, the increasing demand for higher education and the surge in the number of higher institutions seem to have put the latter under tremendous pressure as they compete with each other and therefore use different marketing strategies in their discourse. The marketisation of higher education becomes relevant as tertiary institutions, particularly in the West, now compete to attract and retain students and earn reputations as successful and effective institutions (Maringe and Gibbs, 2009) by adopting market-like ideologies and diversity policies (Edward, 2004). Studies on the marketization of higher education have looked at brochures, prospectus, flyers, and websites (Bhatia 1993; Askehave, 2007; Xion, 2012; Kheovichai, 2014; Han, 2014; Brown, 2015; Oke and Olajimbiti, 2021). These and many other studies have established marketisation of higher education as a genre and prospectus, flyers, websites and other social media platforms as sub-genres. However, the marketisation of higher education in email discourse has not been adequately studied. Email provides global access to engage the target audience as a communication channel. Because of its global accessibility and ability to communicate personally and directly, tertiary institutions, particularly Western universities and other private universities in Africa, employ promotional email to encourage student enrollment. Promotional email, which refers to the use of email to promote a business’s products and services to create awareness and keep customers engaged (Rettie and Chittenden, 2003; Silver, et al, 2022) is now being adopted in HE email discourse.
Some studies have examined email advertising for tobacco products and painting exhibitions (Silver, et al., 2022; Isik, 2023). These studies have shown how promotional emails are used to persuade customers. Similar to the business world, higher education institutions also engage email advertising as one of the crucial channels to publicize their services and offers especially to prospective students. Worth noting that the number of unsolicited emails particularly about higher education the authors of this study and their close associates received motivated this research. Incidentally, some of these close associates were recently admitted by Western universities and willingly made available some of the emails they received in this context. The way language is used in promotional emails to persuade prospective students has received less scholarly attention and is a form of rhetoric. As a discourse concept, rhetoric is the art of persuasion through communication to inform and motivate others by using certain narratives. In this study, rhetoric is conceived as a persuasive strategy in unveiling how language is used in promotional emails to convince prospective students to enroll. The sparse scholarly research on promotional emails in tertiary institutions constitutes a gap given the transformation of higher education through institutional online spaces. Therefore, this research seeks to fill the gap by attempting to extend the frontier of scholarship on the genre of marketization of higher education, highlighting linguistic resources associated with the construction of promotional emails and examining specific rhetoric that characterise the information structure of email discourse in HE.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Promotional Feature: It refers to linguistic or non-linguistic elements that are strategically used to promote a product or service in order to attract attention.
Rhetoric: It is the art of persuasion through communication to inform and motivate using certain narratives.
Waiver: A waiver refers to a policy that allows an action that differs from the usual as a form of special consideration.
Self-Promotion: It relates to any act of self-praise by stating what one has the capacity to do by drawing inferences to the antecedent with the intention to convince others.”.
Email Discourse: It is the study of language use in communication through electronic mail.
Promotional Email: It is the use of email to promote a business’s products and services in order to create awareness and keep customers engaged.
Offer: It describes the presentation of what an organization or institution does in terms of services or products for the interest of those that would like to have them or use them.
Moves: These are discriminating elements of the generic structure of discourse.